Team Foundation Build Requirements for Team System

To take advantage of the Team Foundation Build feature, one or more computers in the Visual Studio Team System environment can be designated as build servers. Team Foundation Build has specific hardware and software requirements. When planning to deploy Team Foundation Build servers, you should understand requirements that are specific to your business needs.

Hardware and Software Requirements

Team Foundation Build provides the functionality of a public build lab. With Team Foundation Build, enterprise build managers can synchronize the sources, build the application, run build associated unit tests, perform code analysis, release builds on a file server, and publish build reports. Build result data is propagated to the warehouse for historical reporting. Team Foundation Build works with other Visual Studio Team System tools during the build process including source control and work item tracking. A range of recommended server requirements are discussed in the previous sections. In addition, if you want to deploy across multiple languages, you must plan for what languages you want to support across your deployment.

Hardware Requirements

The following table shows the recommended hardware requirements to deploy Team Foundation Build, depending on the number of users and the number of files being built.

Configuration

Build time

CPU

HD

Memory

Minimal, 1-2 projects, 5-20 users

30 minutes

single processor, 766 GHz

8 GB

256 MB

Small, 2-20 projects, 20-100 users

30 minutes to 2 hours

single processor, 1.5 GHz

30 GB

512 MB

Medium, more than 20 projects, 100 to 250 users

2 hours to 5 hours

single processor, 2.6 GHz

50 GB

1 GB

Large, more than 50 projects, 250 to 500 users

3 hours to 7 hours

dual processors, 2.8 GHz

80 GB

2 GB

The guidelines presented here are provided as general guidance for hardware planning. Build performance will vary greatly based on the source code on a given server, and the complexity of the build process.

The server that will run Team Foundation Build should have a reliable network connection with a minimum bandwidth of 1 Mbps and a latency maximum of 350ms. There should be no firewall between the Team Foundation Build server and the Team Foundation servers. If your build performance does not meet your expectations, consider upgrading your hardware configuration.

Additional Hardware Considerations

In addition to the recommended hardware, you should consider additional hardware for critical servers, such as redundant power supplies and redundant fans.

You should not use your Team Foundation Server as your build server. Builds should be performed on separate computers. Because of the high demands put on build servers at build time, running builds on a Team Foundation server could lead to server unavailability and poor performance.

Software Requirements

The following table shows the required software for Team Foundation Build servers.

In addition to the required software, consider whether you want to install additional management or security software, such as backup software or firewalls. For more specific guidance for Team Foundation Build software requirements, see the Team Foundation Installation Guide. You can download the latest version of the Team Foundation Installation Guide from the Microsoft Download Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=40042.

Language Requirements

To avoid confusion and simplify operation, a Team Foundation Build deployment should be configured to use the same language as the computer's operating system and that of Team Foundation Server. You can, however, install another language version of Team Foundation Build on an English-language server, as long as that language matches that of the Team Foundation Server deployment.